


In Light that Blinds

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode AU: s10e06 Extremis, Episode AU: s10e08 The Lie of the Land, Episode AU: s10e11 World Enough and Time, Episode AU: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, Identity confusion, Other, Post-Episode AU: s10e05 Oxygen, Time Lord blindness, Wound Tending, a bit of blood a bit of bodies four bullets some lasers, and metaphor abuse so much metaphor abuse, regeneration chicken, regeneration-sharing, sense-sharing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 15:49:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28923120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: When the Doctor returns to the Vault blind, Missy gives him her sight. But then he comes back with four bullets in him. How much of herself will Missy give him? How close will Missy’s choices bring them, and as they discover the Mondasian colony ship, with the Master on board, what will it mean to be by the Doctor’s side?
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21
Collections: Fiftieth Masterversary Big Bang





	In Light that Blinds

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Fiftieth Masterversary Big Bang](https://dwmasters.tumblr.com/). 
> 
> Beautiful, beautiful art by [Androktasia (AO3)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/androktasia/profile)/[petercapaldish (Tumblr)](https://petercapaldish.tumblr.com/)—without whose inspirational collaboration I don't know how I could have finished!

It starts with the eyes. She can function just as well in the dark, she says. Here, in her limited domain, every object has its place, and she can play the piano, she can pace the perimeter, she can contemplate her sins all without seeing any of it. He’ll bring her new books: aural books, haptic books, telepathic books from his hodgepodge library. He’ll promise not to move things about arbitrarily. She would hear him, anyhow, and know. 

Her world is small, and why should she need to see it? She’s seen it enough, after so many years. She gives him his eyes and then she pulls up her visual memory and she overlays this memory on the physical present and she settles in as though nothing has changed at all. 

He’s her mirror when she asks for it. He sits opposite her and stares into her face, his fingers shifting and fidgeting on her temple. 

It’s not a stretch to brush her skirts against his mind, her knuckles against his thoughts. _Show me something you’ve seen_ , she says, _out there_. And he ought to have done this all along, because there are those stars of his, so much the brighter for his wonder and despair. 

She’s careful not to do the reverse to him. He doesn’t need to know about bruises in the dark, or about memories, livid in the dark, of the other eternities, trapped in broken bodies, wrong bodies, always cold, always fevered, full of unfamiliar light through alien eyes, confusions of shadows in muddled peripheries. He doesn’t need to know the hungry, devouring hollowness, feel flesh drawn tight over scarred flesh, experience sticky, soft decay. She’s seen his revulsion before, his fear. 

Alone, Missy thinks about her skin, strokes supple smooth stretches of it to reassure herself. She thinks about the Doctor’s hands on her skin. She imagines not knowing until the moment he touches her where and how he will touch her. 

She recalls his face when she had had him below her and he couldn’t see what she would do. She’d run her hands over his chest and taken him by the hair above the ear and jerked his head back. She’d held his eyelid open with her thumb and forefinger against the bones of the socket and pressed her palm over his eyes and forced the light into them. 

He’d struggled, yes, but she doesn’t know whether he’d resisted her, really, or whether he’d let it happen, though he’d bucked beneath her thighs. 

Afterwards, he scrambled away, full of Doctory horror as always at all the nicest things. She felt it pull apart from her, that bit of herself she’d fed into him as she might a loose thread into a needle, which with every stuttering backwards step he wound out of her in a multitude of minute, ripping pops. She felt it trail after him, a lit fuse dragging along the floor and tangling among the legs of the chair he’d knocked over in his distress. She saw, as it attenuated between them, the blur of her form standing very still and contained, and the Doctor turning to the door, his fingers sure on the locks.

Then he, and it, had gone. 

He returned days later and sat heavily outside the door, too full of reluctance or of shame to come in. She listened to him talk as she always has and always tries not to. She rested her hand on the place on the door on the other side of which was the crag of his back. She let her skirts crease under her knees. 

It starts with the eyes: 

He comes to her clumsy with brain damage, still cold at the memory of bare vacuum crackling across his skin, and what else can she do? He's mottled and rough where rays of radiation have touched him. He's brittle—oh, he's been brittle for ages, like a cast-iron structure corroding under its paint, but this is ice crystals, stalactites in the cave of his mouth, bristly grit of tiny sweat knives down his neck. It’s sharp shards over wet membranes, milky protective film over recently burst blood vessels only just cleared away. 

Missy watches him. She sees him stumble. She remembers that she likes it. 

Compelling, the Doctor like this. The vault is an entirely, excruciatingly known space, inscribed with the invisible paths of seventy years’ familiar back and forth. And still he hesitates. He's so uncertain. It's heart that he's missing, the will to pretend he's fine. It's exhaustion and the demoralisation they never talk about. 

Lately, he’s come alive, his smile real, the light in his face more than the glow of opaqued windows; it's the student, of course. He's old and vampiric, and though the lecture hall and the fanbase—generations of avid audience, drawn by word of mouth, enraptured with whatever nonsense he wants to talk about—have kept him fat on adoration, those dribs and drabs of young blood don't satisfy in comparison to his usual diet. A direct infusion’s the only thing that’ll do it; Missy would never have mistaken his happiness for anything else, even if he had tried to lie about it. 

Now, now that the indulgence has paid off in loss, he’s helpless before his own bottled guilt and anxiety. He’s angry at the universe, and his face captivates her; she studies its shadows. How exquisite that this is the one it should happen to, of all of them, all silvery-stormy torment. How beautiful! He comes to her blind, but that’s all right, because she sees for him; she’s always seen what he couldn’t. That _is_ how they work.

“Oh, Doctor,” she coos, circling him, because it’s what they’ve come to expect, “what have you done to yourself?

“I didn’t do it to myself,” he says, truculent, pouting and frowning all at once. “I did it for someone. To help someone.”

“To be good? In order to be kind?”

“Yes.”

“And now that you have, how do you feel?”

The Doctor doesn’t say anything in reply. Missy smiles, her face softening. He stands at the centre of her survey, his shoulders bent, his head raised, arms painstakingly nonchalant at his sides. Only the tendons on the backs of his hands betray the tightness of his self-restraint.

“You said you’d help me. You said you were my friend.”

“Of course! Of course I’ll help you! But...what do you expect me to do?”

Again, he has no answer. Missy’s smile goes wider. She modulates the brightness in her voice into something more like the haze from a smelter’s fire.

“It’s comforting, isn’t it, having a backup plan in a box?”

The Doctor stiffens. “That’s not what you are.”

“You think the universe needs you. You think you should be out there, smashing and breaking the things that don’t work. But you get people killed. You almost got your friend killed, didn't you? You gambled, and now you’re stuck, really stuck, fumbling in the dark.”

The Doctor snarls, reaching for her. Missy steps out of his way quietly so that the place he’d expected her to be is empty, his hands closing on air. He stumbles into the piano bench, unbalanced. Goading him might not be the act of a nice person...but it’s fun and, more importantly, she’s decided, it's exigent, expedient. She can't have him all upset, not when she's so dependent on him. He bows over the keyboard, one hand braced on the seat’s upholstery.

“Tell me,” she insists, because he has to ask.

She pushes him down onto the bench. “Tell me what it is you want.”

He exhales, and his breath is a shudder. 

She has always seen for him, but that isn’t enough. He comes to her in need, and raging, and maybe she’s been listening to him too long, because she reaches for him and she gives him what he still can’t form the words to ask for. She trades herself for his dark. She listens for him at the door. It starts with the eyes. It starts with the eyes.

Later still, when he unlocks and opens the door, they pretend she’d been at the piano all along.

She feels for the notes by muscle memory. It’s a framework safe and orderly in the new, unchanged, subdued world, perfectly-tempered intervals another compromise she’s agreed to out of necessity. The keys are tactile and real under her fingers, weighted by the levers and the hammers and the escapements, by the friction and the tensile strength of the piano’s materials: wood and cast iron, felted wool and steel. She moves without looking or being able to look, her movements sure, the structure of the music rational and inevitable in her mind’s eye, the physical distances and the frequency shifts consistent in the service of the formal system. She coaxes its premises, makes it unfold—physics, mathematics, logic in the shape of the hand and the object’s persistent obedience. 

He watches her, his eyes adjusting. He listens, for once. Only after the final cadence does he come to stand by her shoulder, the sound fading as the vibrations still and the piano rests. He brushes her collar with his fingertips. 

She lets him show her the stars. 

The stars are physics too, of course, and mathematics, and logic; like the music, predetermined by a formal system, the laws of the universe, the stability of being. And yet, in the space of expression, art. Taking time, here, and giving it back, there. The choice of the contour of the phrase, the pace of the life of the star, sparking, flaring, blazing, collapsing. Lifts, falls. Breath. Emphasis. The touch of the hand, as his is over hers in her lap while he rests on one knee by her side. Colour, contrapuntal, and light: light, intensifying, brightening until the end, until there is no more breath, or only breath, loud in the space of the room.

The way he sees them, they don’t burn, they shine.

“I saw myself—I saw myself as I would have been if you hadn’t helped me,” he tells her after they surface, “in a simulation. He sent me an email.”

“You couldn’t just text yourself? It must have been serious.”

“It was a warning. Something’s coming. Something bad.”

“Oh, don’t be so oblique. I’m a captive audience. You don’t have to worry about retaining my viewership with a catchy teaser. I’ll take any entertainment you offer me. What, exactly, is coming? Is it interesting, at least?”

“I don’t know. These things, they had modeled the whole world, they’d made it convincing. They were running scenarios, using simulacra that were so detailed they might as well have been real. I met one. The computer model of me, that is, he met one. Papery, patient things. Voices like expired raisins.”

Oh. Those guys. Been there, done that, stole the volcano.

“Except they got it wrong, because they missed what happens in here.” _They didn't know about what goes on between us, in shadow._ “They thought he should be blind. He recorded everything they did to him on his sonic sunglasses. Hey! I could modify them like he did, for you—”

“Well. The vault’s good for something,” Missy interrupts sardonically. “Just don’t get killed. I haven’t learned to do my eyeliner without looking yet.”

He doesn’t get killed. But he does disappear.

There is a moment, six months later, everything seems to be screaming at once, and the absolute dark becomes for the duration of that scream absolute light, incomprehensible, equally bereft of information. 

He stalks in not long after that, his footfalls saying nothing about his absence. He’s busy putting on a show for the human lolloping along behind him, the student, kidnap victim, whatever. He drops himself into his armchair as though there has been no delinquency, radiating factory-setting sanctimony. _I am so done with this creature_ , it says for the human’s benefit, _but we’re in a bind_. 

As though he hasn’t come to her every time he’s in need. As though she hasn’t already made her choice.

Missy can imagine his prissy face all too easily in the pause when he calls her a monster, the crease between his eyebrows, his steady scrutiny. He’s made her put up the containment field. He’s on the outside of it, and he might as well still be outside the door, for all that she can reach him. 

So, as she can't get at him, she takes her pleasure where she can, baiting the girl, setting her up for the pathos of the awful sacrifice that will be required of her. Of course she’ll do it, they always do. The Doctor knows just how to pick them. That’s how it goes. It was always going to be this way, whether Missy helped him or not.

When he swings his doomed pet behind him, to protect her or to get her out of the way, Missy steps as close to him as she dares. She tucks her hands behind her back, but irresistible impulse draws her too close too eagerly, and she miscalculates, the bite of the forcefield coming before she expects it. 

She blinks, forces that blink to be her only reaction. 

Whatever he was going to say, he doesn't say it. 

Yet all the while she’s teasing and playing and picking from the buffet of amusement she’s so pathetic for, she’s trying to figure out what the terribly wrong thing is. It buzzes at the back of her teeth. It colours their interaction. It’s got to do with the six months’ sudden absence and the truant game of save-the-world he’s been enjoying without her. But she’s been swatting at the mental flies too much of late to read him easily, as distracted as she is by the trivialities of their invader-of-the-day problem. 

If she could only touch him, then she would know what it is. If she knew, then she could do something about it. But she can’t, and already he’s moving away.

He walks Bill to the door. “Wait for me in the cellar with Nardole. Don't go far; I'll be out in a sec.” Then he ushers her away, and he turns around. And then they’re alone at last. 

He disables the containment field before he's halfway back to it, sweeping straight up onto the platform with her, her hand in his. His hands are hot. 

He drops a spent bullet into her palm.

“Don’t say I deserved it. She shot me. I may have incited her.”

Anger, automatic and autonomic. But suspicion, too—Missy narrows her eyes. “Why?”

“I needed to know I could trust her.”

Maybe there's nothing wrong with the Doctor. Maybe he's just an idiot. 

“It’s a great life, being friends with you, isn’t it? So you were trying to get shot, you had a plan and some protective armour on, and you gave your human a scare.”

“I wasn't wearing any armour.”

“Then, this bullet…?”

He brings her fingers to the hole in his shirt, still damp with the blood that had soaked it.

“My body ejected it when it tried to regenerate.”

Alarm rushes redly through her and she snatches her hand away to set it on his neck instead, her thumb on his jaw. They tumble into the piano bench and against the keyboard, a jumble of bodies and dissonant tone clusters, her consciousness already running down the channels of his being, fitting itself over the shape of him like a template, hunting for the incongruities. 

Bullets, bullets, multiple pain-edged penetrations. How many times did that girl shoot him? Even Lucy had fired the gun only once. 

It’s like a grinding bruise, like a sour thwarted waiting spread all through him, a membrane of destabilising damage pinned at four points of coppery intrusion. It’s ringing in her ears, it’s overwhelming, the suppressed resequencing. Pulsing, it’s dizzyingly familiar, it’s, it’s... _all right, I’m all right. Missy, Missy, come out of there. You’re everywhere. Come out_. 

He’s holding her by the wrists, his grasp soft. He’s staring at their hands. 

“I didn’t want to regenerate,” he says in a low voice. “I stopped it. I don’t want to change.”

The Doctor is always the Doctor to her, but maybe this is the human influence in him. Or maybe it was always like this, since the very first time: he’s convinced that it would kill him, and that he would have to learn to be someone else again. He’s terrified.

But the mesh of him has tried to come apart, and it needs patching. It needs reinforcing. She spins new thread out of herself; this golden, metallic flax she pours into him in a steady stream. She does it because she, too, needs him to stay the same, at least for now. She can’t imagine existing like this if he changes and she doesn’t. 

“I can manage,” he protests. “Don’t—”

“You can’t, not on your own, not for long. Together, we stand a chance…”

She opens his jacket and his waistcoat and his shirt—they’re on the floor now, half-sprawled over the shallow step where they pulled each other down, his shoulders thin in the crook of her arm—and she finds the first wound, listening to its call, letting it lead her to it. 

“Just let me help. Let me keep helping. You’re the only one I would.”

“Yes.” Please.

They’re porous to each other like this; she puts her fingers into his chest and she digs the bullet out, and then the gold wells into the hole and fills him, as good as new. 

She closes her eyes and opens them again. The magma of their being is a liquid even she can see, incandescent fluid tracing their lives from the wounded centre out in paths the shapes of their intertwined, intersecting forms. 

She takes a long, steadying breath. The rest will be worse; they’ve pierced further, the damage deeper. 

When she pulls the second bullet out of his flesh, he grunts. With the third, they’re gasping, panting. 

She pauses again to steady herself against the lightheadedness, her limbs lifting away from her, the Doctor’s body and her own both at removes. She plunges in, running energy ahead of her to protect him, guiding her way by following his pain, filling herself with it exactly as it fills him. 

She’s half power and half matter, but the matter makes demands, it has to take precedence for this to work. She’s holding him open and delving, searching, her hands slick, stuff from inside him is sluicing down her wrists and staining her cuffs, and finally, finally, her fingers, almost too ephemeral to close around it, find the last bullet, and she works it back, back, out, cauterising and sealing behind her, draining the solder of her self into the joins as she goes.

She flops over, exhausted, empty. For a long time, they’re both blinded, burned out, senses overwhelmed.

“If I could lift my hand, I’d slap some sense into you,” she says after a while. Her voice sounds flat and strange to her. 

“If you tried to slap me, I’d stop you.” His voice is hoarse.

She listens for the murmurs in his blood. They’re muted now, humming mildly, mumbling harmonies. Some, she recognises as their voices. Some are the echoes still bouncing around the vault, striking sympathies from the taut piano strings. 

“Please don't get killed again. Or if you do, don't come crying to me again.”

“It's funny; you, saving my life so much.”

“I'm always saving your life.”

“You're always trying to get me killed!”

Something shivers inside her. The Doctor moves his hand over hers. 

“Look.” 

In his mind’s eye, a massive star crumples into itself, its core giving way unseen but unmissable. The surface, anguished, roils—then the violent expulsion, and light so extreme protective shields rush themselves online. Then out and out and out, a shockwave of superfast plasma, destruction destruction destruction. 

And in its wake, creation. Clouds of colour, of metal-laced dust decorate the heavens, gathering themselves in the memory-dream of fusion. 

It's a supernova, the end that is a beginning, the fiery collapse that bursts into stellar possibilities. 

This is what they’d been taught: that in their cells they hold the promise and the threat of an energy as mighty as such a star’s. Missy remembers watching their first supernova (this one, in fact) and seeing only the terrible power, the tremendous potential for undoing. 

“I thought you”—of all people—“would understand about not regenerating.” 

Missy considers for a long time what she wants to say to this. “When it becomes something you can no longer do...it takes on a new significance.”

It was never about regenerating or not regenerating. It was about prolongation, personality, getting to choose.

The Doctor is quiet, in his turn. “I didn’t help you when you were in need. You’ve done something for me I wouldn’t do for you when I should have.”

“You didn’t like me very much then.”

“I was a fool.”

“And help me, yes, but this—! We would have been in ever so much trouble with the Citadel. I’m still not certain this is a good idea, even now. It's dangerous, you know.”

“Do you regret it?”

“I need you to be well. Your survival is as important to me as my own.”

“We’re tied together, now.”

“We always were.”

He saves the world; he installs her in his TARDIS. She wears his terrible sunglasses because it’s sweet that he thinks they’ll be of any use, intending and never getting around to engineering them into something actually functional. She carries the umbrella because it’s sturdy, and anyway he won’t let her have anything more powerful. 

"She's as much a prisoner here," the Doctor explains to Bill and especially to Nardole, and she feels them hesitate to argue.

He brings her souvenirs, red rock from Mars, woad from Celtic Scotland, as though he were compiling a rainbow. She’d throw them in his face, but then he wouldn’t bring her any more. Sometimes, he shows her what he's seen. Sometimes, he wants her to comment. 

She’s still as bored as ever, and so she follows him onto the bridge of the colony ship, and she sits around while he plays out his little drama. She doesn't need him to look up to feel the pull of the black hole above their heads.

She finds it amusing, when the time comes, to probe her umbrella ahead of her like a stick, to get in the way deceptively, and then to sweep its full length under the feet of anyone who’d get in her way. It saves time. If this extra time only ushers them all the more quickly into danger, the danger’s more exciting than the dark. 

And if the dangerous thing is herself, lying in wait at the bottom of a gravity well, masked (she remembers suddenly), gamboling, too pleased with himself? His presence is inevitable, but no more so than the tone that resolves a dissonance: that is, it’s contextual. He’s always been there because he’s where she began. 

She doesn't kiss the Master. She won't follow him. 

He snatches the sunglasses from her face. “What’s happened to you? Who’s done this?”

“Nothing,” which is so patently false it isn’t even a lie; “no one,” which is true.

He paces around her, too close and not quite touching. “Ten years, I watched you, waiting, and this is all the explanation I get?”

Missy shrugs. “You wasted your time.”

“No.” The snarl in the Master’s voice twists the simple word. “I really didn’t.”

He drops the sunglasses onto the floor. She hears the squeak of twisting plastic and the squeal of distressed circuitry as he crushes them under his boot. 

“Something is very wrong with you, and we’re going to fix it.”

She hears his gun, too. But by then he’s pressed up against her, and the muzzle is on her chest. Though it’s only set to stun, for a moment, it stops her hearts, and he’s holding her as she staggers, he’s holding her as she falls. 

"We'll market it," he whispers savagely, "as self-improvement."

And then...

Something in her is calling, calling. A part of her is a siren, an alarm in the dark or a lamp and a lens in sea-fog, collecting and magnifying the light, crying out a name. 

Soot falls across her face, blown about by rooftop winds. She bites down on her tongue, tries to dim the beacon in her mind as she regains consciousness. The Master has wheeled her into the open air, a rag doll in a pushchair. He’s pacing, impatient for his bait to work, for the lure to draw the Doctor to the confrontation. 

Shush, shush, don't call him, don't call him here. 

It doesn't matter. He’ll search for her anyway. He’ll find her, even if she doesn’t reach for him with her mind, with this shout. He’ll be drawn by the feverish, lit wire between them. 

A glimpse of stairs. The door bangs open. Doctor. The wire flares, a white fuse.

“Master!”

That first impression of herself: disorienting, dreadful. She’s sallow, worn, her jacket singed, her skirt torn. Her lip gloss is desperately in need of a touch up. Her hair has come undone, and already it’s half-lopsidedly loose, brushing across her shoulder.

But the Doctor’s eyes are all for the Master, whose mouth lifts in that fleeting, artless smile. Missy remembers the sweetness of it, the surprise of a simple, uncompromised gladness, and its brevity. 

“What have you done?”

The smile disappears, right on cue. “No, Doctor, we’re here to talk about what you’ve done.”

The Doctor’s glance goes to Missy, but skips away just as quickly. “What have you done to Bill?”

“You let her get shot, and I rescued her. I repaired her heart. How long was she your student? A year? She waited for you, oh so much longer than that. She waited and she waited. And finally, you came, too late.”

“She’s all better now,” Missy interjects. It’s perfunctory, and she doesn’t mean it. Bill isn't exactly dead...but Missy knows, as surely as if she believed in it herself, that for the Doctor’s human friend, it isn't better just to exist, to continue and not come to an end. Still, she wants to get this game, this twisting dig, this show of the Master’s over with. Still, _also_ , she is the Master too. 

Again, the Doctor glances at her. This time, his attention lingers. 

Hadn’t he felt it, when the Master had stunned her, as she had felt it when the Doctor had almost died? Had it stopped him in his search for a moment, seized him, swooning, in its fist, squeezing? Does he feel, still, the wobbly weakness that she can’t sort from the deficit she’s been living with since he came to her in her cell, needing her? 

“Are you all right?” he asks, though he doesn’t have to. His voice, solicitous and soft, isn’t a voice that was ever meant for her. Yet there it is, directed at her, like a hand not clutching or restraining, but only gentle, only kind on her arm.

Before she has time to answer, a klaxon winds itself into a fury high above them. 

Missy pulls herself, if only by main force, to her feet. She won't let danger find her sitting down. From the street below comes the unmistakable sound of Cybermen turning their attention as one to converge on the hospital. 

“What are they doing?” the Master demands at the ledge, bewildered. “They're coming this way! But they're programmed for human lifesigns!”

“Oh, yes,” the Doctor’s tone changes to one slick with smug satisfaction as he addresses the Master. “I haven't told you. I took a small detour to the computer control room on my way up. I may have tweaked your parameters.”

Missy grips her umbrella, though she knows her aim will be approximate at best. 

As the Cybermen step up onto the roof, she does what she can to stop them. But she's been hooded _and_ hobbled. A door sonicked shut can only do so much to discourage a piece of living armour with a laser on its head, and she has nothing else in her arsenal. 

The beam from the Master’s screwdriver blasts by to hit one of the Cybermen, too close for comfort. It crashes down, on fire. The Master’s discarded the chunky, inaccurate gun he’d used to incapacitate Missy. That one was all for show. This is serious, this is for real. 

Another directed beam, this one the Doctor’s, passing less near her face, no less effective for being sonic. Cybermen are falling right and left, but they’re Cybermen: more are already on their way up the stairs, clanking and rattling with their heavy footsteps. 

“Use your umbrella!” the Doctor shouts over the weapons fire. “Call Nardole!”

Missy toggles through the settings until she finds the static of a comms channel. A year ago, the Doctor’s factotum wouldn’t have answered a hail from her, but now he calls her “Miss”, now he straightens the chairs for her in her cluttered cell. Now he takes her calls.

“What have you got?” she asks as the connection stabilises. 

“Shuttlecraft,” Nardole mutters as engine heat rises past her. “I’m dropping a ladder.”

She fumbles for the bottom rung. The Doctor risks dividing his attention as she tries to catch the whipping ladder. She concentrates on what he sees. It’s a kinesthetic puzzle, using his glimpses to orient her body. 

Finally, her palm lands on a horizontal bar.

But the world fills with cold light, a flood of electric blue. The world is all of a sudden nothing but the shock of pain and damage, of voltage, of irreparable injury…

...and she can’t see…

...or rather, he can’t…

...or rather, he can, but it’s too bright, blackening his vision like the after-effect of a blinding flash, and all he can see as the Cyberman holds him in its deadly embrace is that Missy can’t save him, and the Master won’t. 

The weapon that does rescue him comes out of nowhere. A thick, screaming shaft of energy punches through the air. The Cyberman drops—attacked by the one that was Bill Potts—and so does the Doctor. 

Missy crumples with him. She stays on her feet long enough to make it to his side, struggling, but then her legs give out, her knees buckle, and she slides down gracelessly, skinning her shins. 

Wisps of herself draw themselves to him, like hairs on end, like steam in the cold. She's a reservoir, and it's dawn, and what she's made of lifts above the surface of her, swirls, full of movement, into the air, towards the sun in the parched air, towards her scorching, collapsing star.

He's all gravity, and she's the binary feeding him. He's failing, and he’s taking her with him. 

“Leave him!” the Master snaps. 

“I can’t.” 

The Doctor’s vision swims back into focus. When he blinks his eyes fully open, he sees them all above him: Bill, somehow still showing her concern behind the rubber mask; the Master, caught between his desire to reclaim his future self and his hesitation to touch her like this; and Missy, evanescent, her body coming apart to hold the Doctor’s together. 

He once said he couldn’t run fast enough to hold together the world she wanted to tear apart. But in the end, she’s staying still because what world was ever more than this? She—the Master—has given him everything since the beginning: the plots, the plans, the vast pastures with their unbroken swath of the sky. To see would have been worth nothing without him. 

The Doctor stands, strong again. He gathers Missy into his arms, the only one who wouldn’t sweep straight through her. 

“She’s not yours to keep,” the Master objects, the force of his anger like a furnace stepping close. 

“This isn’t your concern anymore.”

“It’s my future.” 

“Then it’s not your concern yet.” The Doctor pushes past him, their shoulders shoving. “Come with us or not. I don’t actually care. Just don’t get in our way.”

The Doctor holding the Master: the Master is holding off regeneration, shunting the undeniable energies as water into a spillway. Like overflow from a welling weir, that energy slows over the ogee curve, vast curtains of it cascading continuously into the basin below. All that release, and behind the wall, still, the pressure of an entire life. The Master refuses the flood. The Master drowns the plain upstream.

Missy floats in the stilling basin, a mermaid becoming sea foam. She’s looking up at the slamming waters from somewhere below the surface, and the waters are a memory. 

A moment of silver: sunlight refracting. Sunlight that resolves into a person. It’s the Doctor, in profile against the angled glare of the drawn-out day, his hair a weedy, unkempt glow around the shadow of his face. 

“It was Alit’s idea,” he says, circumspect. “Put a mirror by your pillow; then when you wake up, you see my face instead of your own.”

Missy snorts. “Only if you happened to be sitting here.”

The Doctor shifts about in his seat, a kaleidoscope with knobby knees. His expression in the mirror is as fidgety as his body, evasive and hooded and changeable, its meanings unclear, its gaze, in spite of his attempt at service, unwilling to linger on itself. 

“It’s clever,” Missy concedes. She’s on a bed, in a bedroom. She’s covered in a counterpane, and there’s yellowed filet lace over the window past the Doctor’s shoulder. The reflection shows the sun peeping through the curtain behind him. There’s a great deal of wood, from the bedposts to the Doctor’s chair to the wall and the frame of the window itself. It’s all very...human. 

“Where are we?” she asks, though even as she speaks, the subaudible vibration and the funny tugging of the gravity tell her they haven’t gone far, half the colony ship’s length maybe, regardless of the pervasive scents of vegetation and soil and quaintness. 

“Solar farm level.” He pauses. “How do you feel?”

“You know very well how I feel.” Missy’s not interested in talking about this. It’s a fait accompli, past second thoughts, and it’s a distraction from the more important thing, staying alive, keeping the Doctor alive. “Why are we here?”

“This was as far as we could go.”

She seems to remember, now, crashing through layer after layer in Nardole’s flimsy found shuttlecraft, deckplates looming again and again to fill the viewscreen, only to be penetrated through sheer force, all of it becoming one long repeating jolt and jump, until consciousness became the buckling of metal and the hiss of venting coolant. Then engines screaming, a blue sky, its ceiling too far to broach. The ground, instead, green and approaching fast, and a small figure, scrambling from the falling ship. 

“And of course, you want to save whoever lives here,” she says. 

“The people here have already had multiple attacks in the past. They’ve held their own so far, but those were scouts, small reconnaissance forays. They wouldn’t survive a full conversion mission.”

In his mind’s eye, she sees crippled, rudimentary Cybermen mounted on crosses like scarecrows, dotted incongruously about a rolling field, their lolling rubbery heads warming with the afternoon. Charming. She remembers, too, from her own forgotten, mislaid, recovered past, the factory statistics, the number of individuals already converted at this time, missionaries of terror, forming for the march from the bottom of the ship.

“And they will come here, if not right away, then—”

“Soon. They’ll be here soon. Junior found the camouflaged lifts, but he called one, and there was a Cyberman in it. One of the new models, full armor.” 

“Your TARDIS?”

“Can't reach it before we’re overtaken.”

“Hmm.” But Missy doesn't have it in her to question the Doctor’s maths, not now. Her mind’s too full of him and the surprising fear in him, strangely familiar. She pushes the quilt out of her way; under it, she's fully clothed down to the boots as though she's a porcelain doll tucked into a toy bed. “His TARDIS, then. It's still down there.” 

“If he never got off the ship, it must not be functional.”

And the thought is fading already, the memory of someone thrusting the Master up against a rough pole and threatening him with a...with something, making him promise to carry one always...

She's clutching at it as it dissolves, thinking maybe if they go to him she'll remember, when an explosion and the sound of several startled humans scatters the thought for good. The Doctor’s at the window in an instant, and he sees a barn with a hole in it, smouldering at the edges, and a Cyberman standing at the hole, still and mute and staring.

Missy hauls herself out of bed, grasping for a bedpost to lean on. She’s unwilling even now to seem weak in front of the Doctor, daring him to take notice of it. He only moves over to make room, but she can feel his eyes resisting the urge to look askance at her. 

The humans are gawping at the side of the barn, Nardole cajoling them back to work. Nothing to see here, she can hear him say, his voice carrying in the stunned quiet. The thin smoke dissipates quickly towards some unseen ventilator, barely marring the perfectly programmed, perfectly nice day.

“They think they've put the dangerous one in the barn, don't they? They don't know what they've tucked up all snug as a bug in their cozy home.” 

It's meant to be a playful snap of the teeth, a baring of the fangs—I am the Master, etcetera—but she can feel the furnace in her hands, the eggshell thinness of her being and the pressurised candle behind it, the light behind her eyes, the bursting through of which would take out so much more than a wall. 

But Bill has the creepy bandage mask and the holes for features and the impressive head laser. Missy has the handsome cheekbones and the adorable nose and the china-doll eyes. Someone’s been brushing her hair. The glow beneath her skin suits her complexion. Whatever the Doctor sees when he looks at Missy, even he sees a Cyberman when he looks at Bill. A dismayed, frightened, grieving Cyberman. 

An angry Cyberman, as well. Bill’s weapon didn’t fire for no reason. And, ah, there’s the reason, peeking out from behind her, hands in his pockets in the shadows of the barn. He’s grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“Is he welcome in the house as well?” Missy asks. 

“He doesn't come in. He prowls around out there all night. Anyway, he won't hurt them.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He needs them for defence against the Cyber army that's coming for us all.”

The people in the farmyard are piling sandbags into fortifications, arranging pikes in a row behind the barricade. Missy bites her lip ostentatiously, deliberate with her skepticism. “Doesn't seem to be much of a defence.”

“I've a few tricks up my sleeve.”

“And when they don't work?”

He's quiet, and then she feels him shrug. Missy goes very still. 

“You were meant to avoid getting killed again,” she chides.

“I'm sorry. I don't think I can.”

A scratch of gravel against the window. Missy slips from the room—darkness doesn’t exist anymore, means nothing to her—and sneaks out alone for the very first time. She feels her way down stairs she doesn’t know. Doors open to her, only boards and nails, brass and wood. 

Outside, she has nothing but second-hand impressions and distant memory, unreliable, wilfully misleading images, dim and rancorous, tinged with colour she doesn’t really understand: branches blending into their own shadows in flattening light. Fields, clearings, bare ground beneath heavy boots going grey or silver under illumination from the things in the sky-ceiling that are not stars. Crepuscular; not a Time Lord’s best environment under any circumstances. Fighting her past, it’s impossible, vexing, enough to drive a girl to self-annihilation, as soon as she can locate him. 

Her footsteps are too loud on the unfamiliar ground as she edges out of the shelter of the farmhouse. But every crunched twig, every squishy-squelched spot of mud is a point of information with which she’s quickly building the coordinate system she once tried to deny herself. 

“I know you’re there,” she says from the gap in the retaining wall, stone beneath her fingertips, every one an identifying shape. “Come out, come out. Olly, olly, oxen free.”

There’s a wood, she knows, at the edge of the sloping fields. She’s seen it with the Doctor’s eyes and she can taste it in the night air. She makes her way one step at a time to its periphery. There’s no wind here to rustle its leaves or agricultural pests to disturb its undergrowth, only the waiting stillness, so silent even the plants must not be breathing, the day’s oxygen almost diffused.

So what she hears… 

Hands snake around to cover her eyes. “Surprise,” the Master says, up against her ear. He’s using his sober voice, measured and so matter of fact it’s almost dry.

Missy gasps out a stylised startle; she’ll play along for the present. The Master insinuates himself along her spine, bending his head to hers so that his mouth is close enough to bite. “Come with me.”

He takes her by the hand, and though she can barely feel the tug, she lets him pull her into the unknown, out of the open, into the trees, which absorb sounds even as she makes them, treading on leaves and rustling brush and snagging her skirts and hair. She avoids collisions by only the narrowest of margins, relying on the memory of this very flight, unfolding always with a crucial moment’s delay. The thin branch-ends across her face, the bark that scrapes her knuckles, she recognises, too late to miss. 

The exposed root that finally trips her is a smug indignity, the Master’s hand leaving hers a second too soon, and though she’s on her feet again immediately, crouched low and breathing hard in pique, she’s bruised, frantic with uncertainty—not helpless but at last truly at a loss, alone deep in a wood she’s never seen and at the mercy of a self who disdains what she’s become to such excess she wonders if she’s meant to survive it. 

“Get up.”

There’s no one else she would allow to speak to her this way, but Missy understands the Master’s outrage and she doesn’t begrudge it. To him it can only be horrific, not simply the betrayal of stepping into the vault more or less voluntarily (even if assisted by the shoulders under her arms) but the degradation of subverting who she is to what the Doctor needs. It’s sick, to leach herself, to be subsidiary. She only wishes she could make him see, even when she knows better than anyone that she can’t, and shouldn't—not now, not yet.

She straightens, cautious, her back to a tree. 

He paces before her, loud and agitated, all pent up and the pressure hissing at every seam. Underneath, there’s confusion like a sore bruise. He has his screwdriver in one hand, banging it into the palm of the other. When they speak, it's in a quickfire back and forth, blurring into itself, compacting time, a conversation already in progress before it’s begun. 

“We know I escape this. Somewhere in there, you hold a memory, half-written.”

“Half-erased.”

“But recoverable.”

“Maybe you regenerate.”

“And turn into _you_?”

“Would you rather die?”

“I suppose you're going to kill me: auto-avanticide, and you emerge from my forehead fully armed?”

Missy smiles, lifting her lip over the slightest showing of teeth. “Aren't you looking forward to it, a teensy bit?”

“Never.” The Master’s voice is full of distaste, bewildered disappointment. Somewhere in there, like the flashing underside of a leaf in a tossing canopy, there’s self-doubt, or maybe fear. “I can't become you, ‘ _Missy_ ’.”

She tsks. “Well, that's a shame. I was going to tell you…”

“What?”

“I was going to— I was going to tell you…” But it’s gone again.

He surges forward to press her against the tree; its bark catches at her hair. It’s a torment to her abraded palms, and she tightens her hands into it until it gives under her touch, slumping and scoring her skin. Something about this feels all wrong—mirror-distorted—her ear catching on an infelicity—and Missy thrusts the Master back, grabbing his collar, her head down, bullish. When he fights her, they tumble into the dry leaves, falling with a painful jolt. 

They tussle without dignity. The Master’s straddling her legs, his fingers at her chest, shoving into her jacket, clumsy, blunt, his thighs heavy and squeezing. She pushes at him, gripping his arm, and for a moment he seems about to threaten her with the back end of his screwdriver. But he extracts his hand, already having found what he was fishing for. 

“Dematerialisation circuit,” he says. “You always carry one. Starting now.”

Missy’s eyes are wide. She blinks. “But how could you have known to look for it?”

The Master eases back. His voice is considering, like he’s thought it through but this is the first time he’s put it into words. “There's another timeline, under this one. A scaffold, shaping it. Forming the contours of this reality like objects under snow. It's so close to the surface, I only have to scratch it with my thumb to find the impression. Can't you see it? Can't you tell that it's there?”

Sudden, nauseating doubt rises in her. “I don't know… Everything’s so bright, it's impossible to make out any details.”

This seems to give the Master pause. He’s halfway off her, pocketing the circuit, his knee on her belly. “So bright?”

Although she can't see him, her awareness of him is intense. Confronted with him, so close, it's like she's lost in a hall of chandeliers and silvered glass. She's in all the panes and none. He is her reflection and her portrait, face to face to face. This is the blinding brightness. Every plane compounds it. The memories he can’t help but make at each moment; the Doctor’s path, carrying his presence criss-cross across the farm: they’re trails of light that fail to fade in the shrinking universe, the crush of gravity, everything drawing together; all the stars. 

There are so many stars.

It’s light that sears.

She knows the Doctor by his uncertain step and his gasping, rasping, shocked breath, long before the Master hears him. But even before that, she knows he’s there, the heaviness of him in her gut, deep in her pelvis, thickening her throat, filling her bones. His body’s pull on hers is so insistent, and he’s afraid and what he’s full of is her fear, searching for her through the thick vegetation when she doesn’t know where she is or maybe who she is.

His fingers fall on the Master’s shoulder, that first touch—until now he hasn’t touched him at all, always keeping himself well out of reach—ineradicable, marking him with a handprint she can still feel. He pries him off her.

They see her knife at the same time. 

The doubly borrowed vision turns everything into a dreamscape, nothing real, none of it primary, and all of it badly magnified, out of focus. Except it isn’t borrowed, this sight, is it? It’s all hers, all her own. Isn’t it?

 _This is my past_ , she thinks with weirdly hollow fatalism, _I’m watching a thing that’s already happened to me_. And yet she can’t say what it is that’s going to happen, only that she expects a tragedy, at the realisation of which she furrows her brow, because it should have been so very funny, and it’s not. 

The knife is a glinting, nonnegotiable violence protruding from her sleeve, hidden in the cup of her palm where she had held it ready, just waiting to stab. It should have been a tenderness. It could have been a caress. It would have been a mercy. 

The Master dives for it, still on the ground, almost tangled in her skirts. He closes his hand around it, heedless of the sharp edges as he grabs it and pulls it the rest of the way from its sheath, slicing his fingers and opening her palm, wresting it from her. She’d have killed him with it. He twists, his body suddenly leaving hers. As he stands to face the Doctor, he flips to the knife’s handle with a flicked toss of his wrist.

The Doctor scans from one Master to the other, wary, uncertain, his focus moving between the laser screwdriver and the knife. The Master faces them down, a weapon in each extended hand. Missy thought she knew what was coming next, but now, it’s gone unstable, dangerous...

“Missy,” the Doctor says, his voice a warning that barely hides its tremble, “get up.”

In the farmhouse kitchen, the Doctor rummages in his pockets. It seems he’s been keeping secret weapons too. He sets something on the wooden table with a weighty, unmistakably Gallifreyan thunk, the sound of a material neither polymer nor metal, and denser than either could be.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m fixing this.”

She can see it as he inspects it: his hands, the box, glossy and seductive and forbidding. When he splits the shell of the protective case, the device, with its seething sucking core and time like a bereft thing around it, looks back up at her darkly as from the bottom of a temporal gravity well of its own creation. 

Everything of hers that is in him feels the pull. 

Empty a piece of the universe of time. Build an apparatus around it that can tell your future. Set the aperture so that it catches just a glimpse, just enough. Look through this window while you're at it. Get it right, if you can. Give it a knife, a dull scalpel, a hatchet. Hope it doesn’t turn out to be a sickle. Let it at the stuff of you. Let it at your hearts.

The Doctor secures the connective cables to his skin. Fibres inside the tubing enter his head, not so nanoscopic as all that. The sensation that comes to Missy is dull, distanced, muffled, as though the physical space between them, which has been gradually losing its meaning, doesn’t exist anymore, but has been replaced with cotton wool, pumped into the interstices and expanding.

 _Where is your pain?_ she wants to ask. _Don't take it away. I’ve grown accustomed to its undertone; I need its noise. I feel adrift without it._

He lays his hand over the device. He tells it what he wants to do. 

That pinprick vacuum pierces the future. Someday, the Doctor staggers, remembering that in the past he stole so ruthlessly. So desperately. 

No, no, no…

Is it this Doctor of tomorrow screaming, this sound in her head, or is it the Doctor of today, stubborn and selfish as a child? She opens her mouth, her head tilted back and her exposed throat the mirror of his, a puppetry, the work of a hinged lever that traces the movements of his body onto hers and onto the outline of her form, force-warping its wireframe. He’s gulping air; she’s incapable of breathing. For a long, seized heartsbeat she’s paralysed. Then his head drops and she’s staring at his hand.

His fingers have closed around the little black box. They clutch it, knuckles and tendons showing. Veins blue, skin white. Shifting with the alternating emphasis of bones; forefinger, middle finger, shadows coming and going as those cast by clouds on land seen from far above: the hand is quivering under strain, his wrist shaking just discernibly inside the too-long cuff of his sleeve. 

A milky, watery sight interposes into this one. Big, patchy brown, her skirt. Fog, impossible to focus, as though her eyes are wet. His hand becomes a ghost, washed out as in sun. For a moment, their hands are tracings, sheets of paper pressed together at a window. Then she’s looking down at her own, only her own. 

She can see. She has the headache of all headaches. She is very, very angry. 

It bursts from her as speech. “ _Why_?”

The Doctor’s face is tight and he’s huddled down into himself like he’s terribly cold.

“I wanted to free you. I want you to be able to defend yourself. I want—I need you to have a choice.”

“It's a bit late for that, I’d say.”

“I thought I could break you free. I hoped I could give you back what I took from you. Don't you see, I had to try.”

Missy frowns. “You didn't take, I _gave_.”

“Don't tell me you believe you had a choice.”

“Perhaps—perhaps not at the end; but when it started…”

“When you were my prisoner?”

“I asked to be put in that cage.”

A wry lift, and then the mouth goes bleak again. “I should never have accepted that situation.”

“Because you had so much choice yourself? What should you have done, Doctor? Let me die? What should I have done? Let you?”

He struggles to say it, the words slow though his crisp consonants belie the effort:

“I don't think I’m made for rebuilding the things I've broken.”

The device doesn't work, that much is clear. Studying the Doctor with his downturned gaze, Missy’s fury loses its edge. She touches him gently, stretching to loosen one connector and then the other from his temples, dabbing away the spots of blood.

“That’s what it means to be friends with you. Let it go, Doctor. Just...”

He might have been about to hurl the box away onto the ground. Instead, he closes it slowly and sets it aside.

He finally meets her eyes. But clanking steps walk in on them, strangely recognisable in spite of the suit, and they both break off their contact at once. 

“Oh, here comes the Tin Man,” Missy says. 

Nardole rushes in on Bill’s heels, bobble bobbing blobbily. 

“And Mister Potato Head.”

“Wait, Bill! Sir, are you all right? We heard—”

“I’m fine. We’re fine.” The Doctor slides the device back into hiding somewhere in his clothes. “Is everything ready?”

Nardole opens his laptop on the table. “I’ve programmed it so that pretty much anything on this level can be made to blow in time with whatever we throw at the Cybermen. They’ll think they’re up against so much firepower, it’ll put the fear of tin openers back into them.”

“Thanks for all the software.” The Doctor draws his screwdriver from his trousers pocket and sideloads Nardole’s work onto it. “I want you to lead the evacuation. Hazran and the children will need you.”

“What? No! You need me with you.”

“I’ve got Missy.”

Bill straightens. “And me.”

The Doctor cranes up at her. “If I blow the whole level…”

“You _are_ going to blow the level!" Nardole accuses, as though the Doctor had been denying it. "You’ll be blown up with it, and I am not picking up—”

“There is no going back,” Bill says steadily. How true that is, Missy thinks, no matter how you try. Even for a Time Lord, there’s only ever really forwards, forever reaching into the dimness of the future or the past for some probable resolution. 

So they say their goodbyes while they can. 

Nardole bows to the Doctor and leaves him alone, but he fusses over both Bill and Missy under the pretense of preparing for the evacuation, consulting with the adults going in and out, gathering supplies, checking in on the improvised command centre again and again. Missy lets him fuss, unexpectedly touched. When the Doctor speaks quietly with Bill, drawing her aside, Missy does her best not to listen in. 

Then the Doctor sits down at the table with Missy.

He cradles her hand in both of his. Palm up, her fingers curled protectively, nail polish chipped. The cut in it is already dry, dark and crusted and stiff, effacing the lines. Humans think they mean something, those lines. Hazran comments on this as she stops to offer to bandage it, that now Missy’s future must be her own, as it’s been blotted out. But Missy can see what’s still written there, a scuffed and soil-clogged inscription, antecedent phrase only waiting for her to finish what's begun. 

The Doctor politely and grimly refuses the help. He's unwilling to allow anyone so near Missy, his body itself barring instinctually, shoulders sharp. She’s left to his ministrations, Nardole making noises as he leads Bill and Hazran and Alit—she of the mirror idea, who has snuck out of bed in the excitement—away into some other, unknown part of the farmhouse to go over the plan one last time. 

It’s just the two of them again and he’s bandaging her hand when the tocsin sounds. 

He goes on winding the bandage around her as the wail wends across the farm. It fills every bit of space with its strange sound, reverberating back on itself from the skin of the ship. Impacts pound through the decking in the distance. Searchlights pierce through the gaps in the boards over the windows.

He fastens the binding scrupulously before getting up to gaze out the door. He touches the barrel of the rifle left balanced by the jamb.

Missy watches him and she watches through him, too.

“They’ll be here soon,” he says. “I should be keeping watch.”

Overhead, the first Cybermen hover dramatically, impressively still in the sky. They're not quite stars, and Missy thinks of another sky, of the Cybermen she sent into it and the Doctor's hand on her arm when she'd threatened him with them, her birthday gift. 

“Is it time?” The small human is back, so quickly Missy suspects she's been hanging about in the hallway. She walks straight up to the Doctor’s side. “Is that my gun?”

“No,” the Doctor murmurs abstractedly. He’s staring out beyond the farmyard, not listening at first. “What? No. No...how about…” —he casts around for some inspiration— “...this apple. That’s much better than a gun." 

"You may have heard the phrase ‘an apple a day’..." 

He casts a glance in Missy's direction, only long enough to raise an eyebrow. "You know what to do?”

“Yes.” 

Oh, to be so confident again. 

He watches Alit and Nardole go off hand in hand across the fields with the vivid red apple and the laptop. He watches them disappear over the rise, Nardole’s hat like a signal buoy on a grassy sea. He's still watching as the explosion throws a phalanx of Cybermen into the air. The fireball backlights the Doctor’s profile, framed in the open doorway, picked out in the flash as always.

It's the last thing she's going to see with her own eyes. The briefly-repaired vision's already fading, falling back down into the Doctor. He knows it. He rubs his hand over his face.

“Missy…” he says to her at last. “You don't have to come with me. You don't have to stay.”

Missy scoffs. She holds up the hand with the inadequate bandage on it, letting him glimpse the brilliance seeping through, if only for a moment. Below the edge of the binding, her veins are warmest gold. He closes the short distance between them, as though he could make such nearness staunch the flow. 

Their bodies whisper between them, whatever they choose to do or say now. Still, Missy has to try.

“Sometimes, I think we were always like this, you and I, and what was foolish—what of course we had to do—was to fight it. The only difference is that _this_ is visible where it wasn't before.” 

She withdraws her hand before he takes it. She tries to imagine not knowing until the moment he touches her that he is going to touch her. But it’s down to the mathematical power of the formal system, the predictive power of the people they are and the universe they exist in, asking and answering the question all at once, that musical phrase with its inevitable conclusions; it's shaping the story—

“You want me to stand with you.”

“I do.” The Doctor closes his eyes. “I always have.”

She laughs at the little half-lie, the self-deception. “You said I couldn’t see the stars, or hear music. You said I don't know how, without you. It's only that I know how stars die, how music ends.”

“Please don't show me that.”

“No. And you already have my eyes.”

She thinks of the end of stars—and of their beginning, all the light drawing close together and bursting out again, as inescapable as the force that holds her to the Doctor. She presses her palm to his cheek. His cheek glows with the flicker of a fire’s reflection. 

“There's another version of this in which I walk away. I don't see that as any more of a choice than this one.” 

“But—”

“It’s all right, Doctor. It’s only the way the premises are set up; it’s the underlying meaning of who we are, leading us to the right ending. It’s consequences, need and need's consequences. Some part of us both knows how to reach that resolution even if we can’t see how we got there.” 

She brushes the skin under his eye with a soft touch of her thumb. She smiles, and then she releases him. 

“Come on; we’re going now. This time, you won’t stand alone.”

She leads the Doctor into the woods. Every scrape and graze on her body is a mark on the map that shows her the way. They shelter among the trees and behind the branches that had scratched and caught at her before. Morning has come without dawn, night fading into lambent day, artificial suns filtered through diffracting cloud. Step by step, they make their way to their meeting with the Cybermen. 

There’s an advantage to all this lightness: her feet barely disturb the leaves as they wend through the wood.

The Cybermen march straight across the solar farm as though nothing can stand in their way. They don’t care about the shape of the land underfoot or about their superseded models on scarecrow detail. Nothing will stop them; they’re inevitable, inexorable. But here’s the Doctor, making that stand anyway, facing them with his head up and undaunted, and Missy isn’t afraid, either, for herself or even for him. She’ll not run, not anymore. 

She squeezes his hand hard before she lets him go. 

It's a privilege to witness the Doctor fight. He isn't elegant but he’s touched with some sort of grace as he propels himself from explosion to explosion, ducking debris, his voice fervent, his mind ringing with his conviction, with the rightness of opposing the Cybermen, of stopping them, even if just long enough, of doing it for that handful of humans and in the name of every time the Cybermen have tried to have their way and the good guys have prevailed. 

Missy has her old screwdriver, taken from a Master who would have used it against her, turned it against his own future. She's fighting by the Doctor's side. The frequencies overlap and intermix, singing together, mirrored scales, waves on waves to withstand the onslaught. 

She’s slicing through casings and picking off stragglers with great satisfaction—who’s fully armed now?—the Doctor running about while she covers his back, and they’re buying time; every shot she takes is buying another moment of the Doctor looking the monsters in the eye and saying not yet, I’ll hold you off yet, with every breath that’s left. 

She understands this, yes, she understands about the defiant, _hopeful_ not yet— 

—and their bodies have limits, and this is something she learned long ago and isn’t sure the Doctor ought to understand. 

She’s blind, and she misses the fatal Cyberman. It was going to happen sooner or later: the head laser drills into him while he’s aiming for the moon, beatific and oblivious. No...not oblivious, but uncaring. He lets the Cyberman shoot him in the back. He gasps out a mangled shout, shocked, stops, twists in the air as he turns to address it. 

The Cyberman depresses the controls on its abdomen. The second beam enters his chest as a crashing heat. Missy feels it in her own and screams her grief against a tree, tearing its bark and her nails as she and the Doctor both stagger, straining to keep to their feet. 

And then, relentless, the Cyberman empties its batteries a third and final time into that wheezing, struggling old man who will not fall, and there’s no refusing it anymore. The Doctor collapses to his knees in the moss.

Missy knows what’s coming next.

These are not bullets she can dig out of his body, damage she can fill in with her own; this will ask for everything, take everything, merciless, heedless of the voices crying out.

But even now, there's still their last defence. Even both blinded now, all of their senses exploded, there’s the final step in the Doctor’s plan, like a beacon clarion calling. Missy can feel the Doctor’s tumult, his railing confusion, shone glaring through pain, the personality unwilling to recognise that it’s time to end this, it’s time to go, still raging, still holding on, his fingers curling into the cushion of living moss on the ground.

His weakness is a gift. Missy gets down on her knees by his side. She reaches for his hands and holds them in her own, and what strength she has left her she can give to him. It seems so long ago now that he asked for her help and she lent him her eyes. Her world was small, and she thought there wasn’t much to see in it: a supernova, a patterned keyboard, the hidden gleam of walls. It isn’t really any bigger now, except she’s blown out her pupils with seeing, and the way is alight, the world is dazzling.

But how it had really started was with stars, long, longer ago still. He’d wanted to show her; she’d wanted to see. He’d needed her vision, in the end, as she had his regard. 

It _is_ great. It's a kind of greatness, being friends with the Doctor. 

Maybe it’s wrong to give everything to the Doctor like this. The Master has spent, spitefully and profligately spent lifetimes resisting this choice. That was right—prolongation opened up the paths of their lives. Instability led to instability, always moving forward, even in contrary motion. But finally, it is allowing them to find their way home. 

She lets the reservoir of her life drain into him. It’s refulgent, and she hadn’t thought it could be. It's more, so much more than a reflection. The Doctor opens himself in astonished gratitude, always the obtuse one. He’d needed to know he could trust her. Her certainty now is beyond knowledge, even beyond structure. 

If there was ever a choice, there’s little left of the one who made the choice but a shell of power, a shining outline in the shape of a life, a shield of luminous, glasslike clarity. 

He holds up his screwdriver between them and they grasp it together. It’s time for the last breath. 

The explosion burns in their retinas, like that runaway fusion of their school days, remaking the first stars. She can see them now. Everything is so bright. The brightness holds them to each other. So this is the light, and, oh, _it’s the light that binds_. The shockwave seems to travel away from her; she sees it expanding, sees the Doctor enveloped in it, sees them both illuminated, falling, whole. The end—that's what this brightness is. The shadows are so distant. All shadow is so distant now.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [Androktasia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/androktasia/profile) and to the Fiftieth Masterversary Big Bang mods for making this such a great experience. 
> 
> Happy 50(hundred-or-so)th, Master!


End file.
